Review by Cynthia Capriata

Purer colors… have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them. – Henri Matisse

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. – Georgia O'Keeffe

The artist Sheyda Ardalan uses high- pitched, pure color as a vehicle for describing light, space and mood in piercing landscapes. The rawness of color combined with her imagination and fantasy reveal an artistic individuality expressed in relation to her personal experience and emotional response to nature. The artist celebrates the intensity and life of pigments found in ordinary landscapes such as a desert in Iran or a coastline in Scotland.

The preference for pictorial flatness, clean colors and simplified shapes come from the artist’s exposure to Persian carpets and traditional textiles early on in her life. Working with the expressive effectiveness of pure color, she attempts to make visible and manifest hidden colors found in the barest of landscapes and bring them to the forefront, capturing the essence of nature the way a Persian carpet captures the soul of a garden.

Flat planes of fragmented shapes and saturated colors redefine color and form as means of communicating an emotional state. The impulse to work with saturated colors as opposed to traditional ones is evident in this series. Color projects a mood and establishes a structure within the work without having to be true to the natural world. The colors do not correspond to the way color appears in real life, but rather to what the artist feels, what she perceives, and what she makes of it.

The composition is aflame with vibrant paint. One can think of color as an independent element that creates an underlying force of visual impressions in the pictorial space. The rhythm and energies of the landscapes show her working toward an important study of color and resonate with the intensity of the viewer’s experience. – Cynthia Capriata, Artist and Art Educator, 2017, Lima, Peru